Latched to the old rusting ladder of the ancient amusement park tower, high in the baking night, he was a droplet of black ink against the darker palette of night sky. The burning smell of a summer fire drifted in the still heat as he brought the binoculars to his eyes. As he looked down upon the massive obsidian glass stone in the lake at the bottom of the hill. The black stone was veined with orichalcum, glowing brilliant gold as the powerful magic infused it with new life.
Screams reached his ears then. Insistent, frantic screams of a lamb in human flesh. A child? Then the pleading cries went silent with the slash of an obsidian knife. A quick cut by a white-skinned human with dark hair and a beard. His smile was cruel and mocking, his eyes gleeful and drunk with power. He was familiar.
The man held the child by the hair-a brown girl in the throes of puberty-pulling back her head so that the sanguine liquid of her life drained into a funnel. Her blood flowed down a narrow hose, a conduit from the child's neck, through the water to the obsidian stone at the bottom. Wispy, red clouds formed in the crystal-clear water at the end of the hose, billowing around the stone as the girl gave out, her gurgling cry dying in her throat.
Watching from high above, he felt the knife as if it had struck him instead of the child. A searing pain across his neck, a choking spurt of blood gushing to fill his throat. Before…
He woke, shooting up to a sitting position in his clinic bed. The cold, distant lights of the machinery along the wall to his right blinked at him in silent mockery of his nightmare. Breathe. Breathe. Sweat froze on his back.
Where do these dreams come from? He couldn't remember
anything like it. His memory was returning slowly, though. He knew his name. Thomas, he thought. My name is Thomas. Thomas Roxborough.
It was the one truth he clung to, a rock in the shifting tide of erratic memories.
The door clicked open then, and a technician entered. She was tall and broadly built, not one he recognized. Her wavy blonde hair hung around a smooth-skinned face that would have been pretty if her dark eyes had been softer, their expression less chillingly hard. Sharp-angled bulges under her lab coat sent warnings off in his mind as he watched her approach.
Something was wrong.
But what should he do about it? He didn't know.
She had reached the side of his bed before he could decide to do anything. "Ryan, it's me," she said. "Axler."
This woman knows me? And she called me Ryan. Why not Thomas?
He did not answer her, though she was obviously waiting for some sort of affirmation. Then he nodded slightly. Best to play along.
"We're here to help you escape."
We? Then he noticed that the door to his room had not closed itself completely. Something was keeping it open even though he couldn't see anything there.
"You must be drugged," she said. "Can you move?"
He nodded again.
"Good." She handed him a black cloth bundle. "Hurry and put this on before the alarms go off and wake the whole place."
He just stared at her, unsure of what to do. How could he just leave with a stranger?
"Come on!" she hissed, her voice pitched low and threatening. "We're in danger here, Ryan! You scan?"
Ryan again? Despite the hardness of her eyes, he could see that she was sincere. She cared about his safety. "I scan," he said, "but I can't go with you."
Axler's hard eyes narrowed on him. "I don't have time for this, Ryan," she said. Then she reached under her lab-coat, and there was something in her hand when she pulled
it out. Too fast to see, her hand a blur as she connected with his neck.
Leaving a patch. A dermal drug patch.
"Sorry, Ryan. I don't have time to argue just now."
It only took a few moments for his muscles to relax. He sagged into her arms. His senses seemed to detach themselves from his body and he found he couldn't move.
Axler lifted him over her shoulders; she was stronger than she looked. "Grind," she said, speaking under her breath as they passed out of the room into the hall beyond. "I can't raise Jane. Can you get through?"
"No," came a gruff whisper out of mid-air. No one was there. Magic invisibility?
"Frag, where is she?"
Axler's shoulder hammered into his chest as she ran, out into the white and black-tiled hall. The guard at the first checkpoint looked asleep, and he did not move as they approached. His head jerked as one of Axler's invisible companions lifted it up by the hair. The man's eye was placed to the retinal scanner and the lock popped open.
"That was the hard one," Axler said, then jolted through. They passed the elevators that had taken him to see the vats. Part of himself, part of Thomas Roxborough, still there in that tank.
Or was he Ryan? Who the frag am I? And what am I escaping from?
Axler stepped up to another door and looked into the retinal scanner that hung on the wall next to it, muttering under her breath. "I hope Jane's codes are still working," she said. "I hope you appreciate the drek I go through for you, Ryan."
/ guess I'm Ryan then, he thought. For now anyway.
Ryan felt rather than heard the collective intake of breath by the other two accomplices. But the door clicked open and Axler led them through. Null strain. Beyond the doors was a wide staircase, switching back every level, with no windows.
They descended two floors to level one, and Axler's retina worked again to get them through the door. And into a wider hall with several people moving along it. Ryan heard them more than saw them. His eyes were open and he could see,
but he didn't have motor control of his muscles. His head swung loosely, swaying as Axler carried him.
Axler's labcoat filled most of Ryan's vision, but the people he did see caused creeping waves of nausea through him. One was close, a dwarf woman once perhaps, but now her dwarf body had been almost entirely replaced by human-sized cybernetic limbs and torso. Everything external was artificial. Except for the dwarfs hairy head. The dwarf cyborg walked awkwardly, trying to gain control over a new center of gravity.
/ doubt that will ever be completely possible, Ryan thought. And as he looked around, he realized that each of these people was barely alive; each was mostly machine and many were walking hulls. Their wills only a dim shadow. It was a sudden comprehension that came through a myriad of senses, a gut feeling fed by the smell of synthetic lubricant and the queer uniformity of the cybernetic parts.
Axler ran for the double doors at the far end of the hall. Moving as fast as she could with Ryan's weight over her shoulders. Ryan upgraded his assessment of her strength and speed yet again. She is far more than she looks, he thought.
Grind whispered from behind them. "I still can't raise Jane."
"Jane," Axler subvocalized. "Jane, you copy?"
She waited for a few heartbeats. "Jane must be off-line," Axler said, turning back toward her invisible accomplices. "I'm going to call in Dhin without her."
"Copy," Grind said.
Axler pulled a machine pistol from under her labcoat. "Go, Dhin," she said. "You got that? Launch now."
They had reached the double doors, and Axler's retina released the lock. She opened the door a crack and propped it ajar with a foot. And waited. One beat. Two.
The ground shook from a massive explosion. And at that precise instant, Axler threw open the door and lunged out into the early morning sunlight. She ran across a narrow open space, a courtyard perhaps, rectangular in shape and filled with sculpted gardens and trimmed tropical trees. The space was bounded by the clinic wall on one side and fencing on the other three sides. Five-meter-high cyclone
fencing topped by mono wire. Ryan knew the fence was electrified just by looking at it, though how he knew was a mystery to him.
Sound came crashing in on him as Axler's sharp shoulder needled his gut. Alarm sirens blared out a keening wail. Automatic weapons sputtered from off to the right as a combat-equipped helicopter engaged some ground troops who were trying to guard the clinic's perimeter.
Ryan saw the results of the explosion. A missile or mortar shell had hit the fence at the far end of the courtyard. He saw fire and noticed that the fence lay like twisted foil. A ten-meter opening stood over scorched earth. But the gap was crawling with security, and Axler made for the opposite fence.
"Ow!" came a voice that Ryan didn't recognize. A second later two people became visible. The one who had spoken was human, wearing blue jeans and MIT amp;T tee shirt. The other was Grind, a dwarf whose arms had been replaced with cybernetic attachments. A third arm, slightly different in shape, telescoped from the right side of his chest. Grind's afro hair was black, and his face was rough with scars. He knelt in front of the fence and produced a tiny circular saw; a machine gun was slung over his shoulder.
The human looked up into the air, holding his hands out in a cryptic gesture. "There's a mage in the astral here. Just a sec." McFaren seemed to be looking at somewhere else as he made cryptic gestures in the air.
Ryan concentrated, trying to figure out what the mage was doing. And suddenly he saw it. The world shifted for a second, shadows and light lengthening and contorting into a strange world that looked sort of the same, but very different as well. Rainbow hues and colors of light radiated in prismatic beauty from every living thing.
Then he saw the mage, hovering in mid-air like a fiery phoenix. A flash of energy arced from McFaren and slammed into the mage. The phoenix shimmered under the onslaught, flickered, then winked out. Powerful spell, Ryan thought.
"That one's gone, but they're more coming," said McFaren. "I'm through." That was Grind.
"Let's haul hoop." Then Axler was dragging Ryan through the hole in the fence. Gunfire rattled off to his left; sirens rang out. Ryan caught a mouthful of dirt as Axler lifted him again. Her shoulder slammed into his gut as she sprinted across the thirty meters of clear dirt to the edge of the jungle. She pushed into the thick undergrowth, seeking cover, then dropped Ryan to the moist jungle floor, behind the trees.
"Dhin, can you see us?"
"Got ya clean in the sights, Grind. Want a missile up the yin yang?"
"Maybe some other time, chummer. Now, how about a lift?" "On my way."
The helo swung around toward them, rocking and tilting under its rotors as it dodged fire. It was nearly clear when a missile launched unexpectedly from somewhere on the roof of the clinic. It rocketed through the drifting steam and smoke of the battle. Ryan watched as the missile connected with the flying hull of the helicopter, catching it in the midsection and exploding, ripping away metal in a white-hot flash.
"Dhin!" called Axler, watching from just inside the jungle.
Gouts of flame blew away the engine casing. Smoke and fire venting like demon's breath as the helo faltered. Then a final attack hit, deadly fast, a magical hellblast centered on the cockpit, warping the macroplast shielding, incinerating anyone who was inside.
The helicopter stalled and fell. It exploded before impact, jets of flame and shrapnel blowing out of the engine. Then the hull of the craft came down hard, bouncing against the clinic wall before crashing to the ground with the agonizing sound of ripping metal.
Nobody could have survived that, Ryan thought.
"Drek!" Axler said. "I sure hope Dhin wasn't in there, or it'll be a long trek home."